arXiv Computation and Language

Adaptive Test-Time Compute Allocation for Block Diffusion Language Models in Complex Reasoning

The paper introduces a test‑time compute allocation framework for block diffusion language models, featuring Bounded Adaptive Confidence Decoding (BACD) for step‑wise adaptive denoising and the Think Coarse, Critic Fine (TCCF) paradigm for block‑wise generation. BACD dynamically adjusts denoising based on model confidence to accelerate inference while limiting error accumulation. TCCF allocates larger blocks for exploratory thinking and smaller blocks for precise refinement, with Progressive Block Size Extension stabilizing training across varying block sizes. Experiments on six benchmarks show the TDAR‑8B model achieves a 2.38× speedup and +3.4% average accuracy over the TraDo‑8B baseline.

arXiv AI
Oct 9

Test-Time Scaling with Diffusion Language Models via Reward-Guided Stitching

The paper introduces Stitching Noisy Diffusion Thoughts, a self‑consistency framework that transforms low‑cost diffusion‑sampled reasoning into a reusable pool of step‑level candidates. By sampling many diverse trajectories with a masked diffusion language model, scoring each intermediate step with a process reward model, and stitching the highest‑quality steps across trajectories, the method recomputes only the final answer, separating exploration from evaluation. Experiments on math reasoning benchmarks show that step‑level recombination improves accuracy by up to 23.8% on six tasks while reducing latency by up to 1.8× compared to traditional diffusion models and unified architectures.

By Roy Miles, Aysim Toker, Andreea-Maria Oncescu, Jiankang Deng, Ismail Elezi
arXiv AI
Jun 15

Fractured Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

arXiv:2505. 12992v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Inference-time scaling techniques have significantly bolstered the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by harnessing additional computational effort at inference without retraining.

By Baohao Liao, Hanze Dong, Yuhui Xu, Doyen Sahoo, Christof Monz, Junnan Li, Caiming Xiong
arXiv AI
Sep 3

Predict, Don't Iterate: Efficient Adaptive-Length Infilling for Diffusion Language Models

The paper introduces PILL, a new infilling technique for diffusion language models that eliminates the need for a preset initial length and reduces inference overhead. PILL uses probing-based length-free decoding, cutting down on extra forward passes and speeding up generation. Experiments across five diffusion models and eight benchmarks show PILL outperforms the strongest baseline with higher pass rates and BLEU-2 scores while running 1.82× faster.

By Haobo Xu, Sirui Chen, Yuanchen Bei, Lingjie Chen, Yuchen Yan, Dongqi Fu, Jingrui He, Hanghang Tong
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 27

DCGC: Draft-Conditioned Global Correction for Complex Reasoning with Masked Diffusion Models

DCGC is a Masked Diffusion Model framework that performs global correction of flawed reasoning traces in Large Language Models. It uses an imperfect solution draft from an upstream solver as auxiliary context and combines task‑specific supervised fine‑tuning with a Dynamic Dual‑CFG inference mechanism that separates problem‑only and joint problem‑draft branches. Experiments on math, code, and knowledge reasoning benchmarks show that DCGC outperforms standard sampling and simpler CFG variants, and it can improve full test‑set accuracy even when ground‑truth failure labels are unavailable.

By Minhae Oh, Nakyung Lee, Jungwoo Lee
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 29

Masked Language Flow Models

arXiv:2606. 27617v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Masked Diffusion Models (MDMs) promise fast, parallel language generation, but their reverse transition factorises across token positions -- an approximation that breaks down in the few-step sampling regime where parallel generation ought to provide the greatest efficiency gains.

By Iskander Azangulov, Kianoosh Ashouritaklimi, Leo Zhang, Simon Vary, Patrick Rebeschini
arXiv AI
Sep 30

Less Uniform Discrete Diffusion is More Powerful and Scalable

The paper introduces Less Uniform Diffusion (LUDI), a framework that improves uniform diffusion language models by using a less uniform loss and per-token time embeddings to guide reverse transitions and enable confidence-based few-step sampling. Experiments demonstrate that LUDI provides cleaner supervision, enhances few-step generation, and scales to a 7B model (LUDI-7B) that achieves a 3-token-per-step speedup over autoregressive decoding while matching masked diffusion baselines. The work suggests that UDLMs still have untapped potential for complex generation tasks.

By Kaibo Wang, Ding Ding, Fangyu Ding, Zijin Feng, Han Shi, Haili Bai, Jiacheng Sun, Yang Xiang